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Salesforce Summer ’18 Release Notes – First Look

It’s been a busy week at Salesforce Ben HQ, and the start of an even busier period. GDPR is less than 30 days away, and Salesforce has dropped the Summer ’18 release notes ready for our perusal. As most of you very well know, now is the time to start looking into the features and changes that will be hitting every one of our Salesforce org’s over the next couple of months. Over the next few weeks, we will be releasing loads of information around Summer ’18, how to stay informed and our favourite features, so sign up for the newsletter to stay informed!

In this post, we will be looking at 3 key areas that this release is seemingly focussing on, the reasons behind these and some of the interesting features that come with each area…

GDPR & Privacy

No surprises here! GDPR and other key data protection and privacy regulations are a hot topic for the IT industry. They affect what we can store about our customers and how we can use this data. Before these new regulations came to pass, Salesforce was not optimised in a way that complied with these laws. Over the past few releases, Salesforce has introduced the Individual object that helps to overcome some of these previous issues. There are three key enhancements coming in Summer ’18 to the individual object…

Support with Merging Records – Salesforce has added the feature to determine which data privacy record to retain when merging records. This can also be overridden by selecting “Retain the most recently modified data privacy record” in settings.

The Individual Object Supports Standard Object Features– The Individual object currently has limited functionality in the way that it does not act like a normal Salesforce object. You can’t add buttons, actions, record types, or interact with automation tools. This will all change with the release of Summer ’18

Lightning Adoption

Salesforce has taken us all on a journey with the Lightning Experience. With the initial release, there were mixed opinions and a lot of negativity, but over the past couple of years, that has shifted in the opposite direction. Salesforce initially had the problem of fixing up Lightning to be of the same standard (and better) of Classic. Now they have done this, they need to empower Admins to demonstrate the power of Lightning to their users. Summer ’18 has some ways to help Admins accomplish this…

Encourage Users to Adopt Lightning Experience – Ever wished you could just force your users to use Lightning with limited repercussions? An interesting but perhaps controversial feature, you can now force your users to use Lightning without the ability to switch to classic for a limited time period per week. Would you use this?

Discover Why It’s Better in Lightning Experience – Tips have been added in Salesforce classic to try and persuade users to why Lightning is better. These tips only appear when a user tries to carry out a specific function that has been improved in Lightning and can be customised in the onboarding and assistance page.

Let the Readiness Report Be Your Guide to Lightning Experience – “Give us something new!” I hear you cry. Yes, I know the Readiness report has been around for some while though, however, Salesforce makes a good point of bringing it up again. With each release Lightning improves, which means the readiness report you ran a year ago will be radically different now. There’s no harm in trying it!

UI Improvements

One of my favourite aspects of Lightning is the ability to customise anything and everything. Granted, at this stage you can’t customise everything with clicks, but we are getting there. In this release, there are some great additions to the Lightning UI allowing you to personalise your app even further, let’s have a look at some of the main ones…

Search the Object You Want Easily from Anywhere – There are quite a few improvements to the search functionality in this release (see here), but one of my favourites is the ability to select the object you wish to search before doing so. This has the main benefit of allowing you to filter your search results if you know the specific object you are looking for.

Conclusion

I hope this post has given you an overview of what to expect in this coming release, paying particular attention to Lightning & GDPR. However, there is a whole host of other features and tools to look forward to. Look out for our summary posts over the next few weeks and don’t forget to subscribe!